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Blogs

What were the cities of the Bronze Age ?
This site aims to find the names of towns excavated by archaeologists, relying mainly on ancient texts. Conversely, it aims to geographically position the cities and countries of the oldest writings.

About 15 km from ancient Babylon, the tell Inghara is part of a group of ancient ruins over a geographical area of 4 km2, including the tell el-Oheimir, to its west and the Tell Bandar. This set was identified in 1873 by G. Smith as Kish, while the first excavations were not very successful. In 1912 Henri de Genouillac did some surveys. But the mos

The city of Upi is in the Mesopotamian texts only from the 19th century BC, especially in those of Ishchali and Mari. It appears close to Mankisum on an old branch of the Tigris. During the reigns of Apil-Sin and Hammurabi of Babylon, military operations evoke these two towns. An unpublished letter from Mari Yasim-Dagan, A.3193, shows that Upi was

In the Neo-Assyrian tablets, Ishtar of Arbela is often mentioned. Some texts write the city name: Arba-Ilu. Historians have no doubt about this identification. It corresponds to the city of Arbela known to the Greeks by a famous battle of Alexander the Great, the current city of Erbil in Iraq. Strabo wrote about it: "The Macedonians saw Gaugamela a

In 2013 David I. Owen published the archives of a Mesopotamian city called Irisagrig. It is about 1200 tablets which, like those of Garsana, are of unknown origin, probably the results of clandestine excavations related to the recent wars of Iraq.
To know more the tablets of Irisagrig
The translations showed two types of links with Garsana: they sh

In Iraq, the Umm Hafriyat site is a group of tells along an ancient watercourse. Examining pottery shards, McGuire Gibson on behalf of the "Oriental Institute of Chicago", in a 1977 excavation season, identified a small town of about 400 inhabitants, from 3500 BC to 300 BC: each mound represents a different period of settlement. Eight tablets in Ak